Tag Archives: Class

Age- and stage-based assumptions are deeply embedded in care models and across care practices (Grenier, 2012). Whether care is used to refer broadly to a concept, institutional and organisational practices, or to denote relationships between families and older people, age and care are intricately intertwined. This entry focuses on care provision as a site from which to consider the intersections of age and care, and whether current models are in line with older people’s needs, and the new realities of ageing. Care is often linked with discourses of dependence, and paradoxically associated with potential in youth, and decline in age (see Irwin, 1995; Gullette, 2004). In late life, care tends to be delivered based on age eligibility. Yet, with age and what it ‘means to grow old’ an increasingly contested terrain, it is time to reconsider how age is enacted or sustained through care practices, and consider whether age-based models of care are suitable in the contemporary context.

A number of complexities exist when we begin to unpick age and the organisation of care. Formal care provision tends to be delivered through age-based segments of youth and old age. Few formal care services are life-long. Yet, the separation of the life course into age- and stage-based periods, age as an organising principle, and former notions of ageing as decline have been called into question (Featherstone and Hepworth, 1991; Hockey and James, 2003). At the level of personal experience, older people voice that ‘they are not old’ – that the age they are assigned contrasts with their experience and sense of self (see Kaufman, 1986; Bytheway, 2011). This has created a disjuncture where suggested models and expectations are concerned, as well as an alignment with new forms of ageing that emphasise success, health and well-being (see Katz, 2005). And while universal understandings of age are quickly being unravelled, undeniable needs for care amongst older people continue to exist. Older people may need care at various points across their life course as a result of disability or chronic illness, ‘frailty’ or end of life issues, and/or at particular marginalised locations (e.g., poverty, older homelessness). Yet, are such needs for care age-based?

We are at a crossroads where the age-based provision of care is concerned. Although reconfigurations of policy based on chronological age are underway (e.g., public pension), current examples focus on age adjustments, rather than on differing needs or alternate arrangements. Perhaps the retention of age is prudent considering the realities of ageism, reconfiguring age to reduce social expenditure, and the structured inequities in late life (see Gee and Gutman, 2000). However, the contemporary context calls for reflection at minimum. How do we catch up with emerging realities of aging and adjust the organisation of care accordingly? Should age be used to organise care services? If so, in what circumstances? If not, how can we assure that those in need are not further marginalised? Such questions represent a starting point from which to reconsider age-based models of care, question underlying assumptions, and reconfigure care practices so that they are more aligned with changing notions of age and contemporary care needs.

On 19th September 2013, at the Annual Lecture of the British Institute in Eastern Africa in Nairobi, Dr Ann Stewart delivered a lecture entitled ‘Caring about care: Recognising and regulating body work in a global market’. Based on her recently published book, Ann gave a compelling and wide ranging talk about forms of care and asked the question ‘who do we care about and how’? The discussions that followed the lecture were vibrant and engaged, the sorts of critical conversations about labour and about gender that I had hoped would come about in my time at the Institute.

On 21st September, at lunchtime, a terrorist siege began of an upmarket shopping mall in Nairobi, Westgate, a mile or two from the Institute. Everyone reading this will have seen the terrifying images. For well-off Kenyans who have become used to hearing the occasional distant grenade explode in the east of the city, in a crowded church or bar or bus station, the events mark a sea change. Here Kenya’s wealthy elite and the international community are the target and terror is at the heart of our lives. I’ve heard it said countless times this week that, looking at photographs of the attack taken in the mall, many of us recognised shop fronts, escalators, sweet stalls, even marble tiles on which we have trodden. As elsewhere, the mall is at once a response to, and a perpetuation of, a city segregated between the wealthy and the destitute. Reborn each day, sparkling clean, its shelves restocked with international branded goods, the Nairobi mall succeeds in making invisible the messy reality of life in a third world city. It would be deeply dishonest to deny that those who clean the mall, serve its meals, guard it – in short, those who provide us with our accustomed care and comfort – go unseen, unknown, unheeded.

Yet in the past three days we have heard stories of supermarket staff, faced with terrified customers running into the shop when the grenades and gunfire began, shepherding people into store rooms, barricading them in to conceal them from the attackers, hiding them behind boxes in stock rooms. Despite our own bleak assessment of ourselves as deeply divided along ethnic lines, as a society riven by long running racial divisions, in the terrifying and traumatic siege of Westgate mall many have commented on the intersecting unities we have discovered this week. An elderly Indian lady, recently returned home from England to care for her elderly mother in Nairobi, and desperate to do something to help, went down to the perimeters of the mall to serve tea and food to the police and media who have worked without a break for days. There she met an African woman who for many years has come to the mall everyday to sell tea and food to its cleaners, waitresses, guards. For the past three days, these two women have teamed up to cook and bring food to those working outside, plastic bags on the ground, car boot full of supplies wide open and elderly mother, still needing to be cared for, in the front seat watching them work.

But the events of the past three days have also made visible that which the well-off and the comfortable work so very hard not to see. The private security guard paid the minimum wage carried our children to safety through a pool of blood; the waitress whom we never greeted in three years of coffee drinking hid us in the cafe kitchen; the cleaner whom we never knew of ushered us to safety through a back exit.

This past three days, Ann’s question at the BIEA lecture – who do we care about – has been constantly in my mind. And as we slip back into our mutual distrust and distance, perhaps we might remember to ask, who cares about (and for) us?